Ludwig Wittgenstein published one book during his lifetime. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was seventy-five pages long. Its final line stated that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. He believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy. He gave away his enormous family fortune, became a village schoolteacher in Austria, and designed a house for his sister. Then he realized he was wrong about everything, returned to Cambridge, and spent the rest of his life dismantling his own work.

The First Philosophy Tried to Make Language Perfect

The Tractatus, published in 1921, argued that language works by creating pictures of reality. Each meaningful proposition corresponds to a possible state of affairs in the world. Logic is the scaffolding. What cannot be stated logically cannot be stated at all. Philosophy's job is not to answer deep questions but to show that most deep questions are just confusions about how language works. Philosophers at the University of Cambridge, where Wittgenstein studied under Bertrand Russell and eventually became a professor, have described the Tractatus as one of the most elegant and self-destructive philosophical texts ever written. It set up a system so rigorous that it consumed itself. If the limits of language are the limits of the world, then the Tractatus itself, which tries to describe those limits from outside them, cannot be meaningful by its own criteria. Wittgenstein knew this. The book's second-to-last proposition says that anyone who understands him will recognize his propositions as nonsensical. He was asking you to climb a ladder and then throw the ladder away.

The Second Philosophy Said Language Is a Game

When Wittgenstein returned to philosophy in the 1930s, he abandoned nearly everything the Tractatus had argued. Language does not picture reality. Language is a collection of activities, games that communities of speakers play according to rules that can only be understood by playing them. The meaning of a word is not the thing it points to. The meaning of a word is how it is used. The Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953, is the second book. It reads nothing like the first. Where the Tractatus was crystalline and numbered, the Investigations is conversational, fragmentary, full of thought experiments and questions that it refuses to answer. Scholars at the University of Vienna have argued that the two books together represent the most dramatic intellectual reversal in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein was, by all accounts, a difficult person. He was intense, demanding, frequently depressed, and convinced that his students were not thinking hard enough. He worked as a hospital orderly during World War II. He considered becoming a monk. He told friends that his work was worthless and that philosophy was a form of illness. He died of prostate cancer in 1951. His last words were tell them I had a wonderful life. The people who knew him found this difficult to believe. The people who read his work found it impossible to forget. He wrote two philosophies, and each one undid the other, and both of them changed everything.